Macroeconomics—Is It Still Helpful in an Age of Scarcity? - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 111

with macroeconomics, we need only note that in assessing any one of them,
individually or collectively, as an economic input , within the current growth-
oriented worldview, they are all more threatened than labor . In other words, we
have overpopulated the world (and the world of work), which makes it criti-
cal that economic solutions and ecological solutions are, in effect, identical.
Anything else will fail. Symptomatic treatment of problems within the old
paradigm will not work. The dominant worldview for even addressing the
problems must change.
Finally, the Capitalist Scenario pointed out the tragedy perpetrated by
seeking to support people through infusions of automation and reliance on
capital, which can now be defined merely as the conversion potential of the
natural environment into products. We built a system that relies intensely on
increasingly scarce resources and, furthermore, one that discards, discred-
its, and underpays the element it was all intended to serve: people. In order
to elicit final conclusions, we return to the starting point for this chapter—
Keynesian macroeconomics.
Age of Scarcity Changes the Paradigm
As we chronicled, the Era of Limits can be said to have begun approximately
in the late 1960s and 1970s. At the very least, this is when the specter of scar-
cities first received any level of general public attention. The world of the
1930s was a different world. The problems of economic failure were ascribed
to inadequate use of the resources that we had. The difficulty has been
described as idle capacity, not only human labor but also such resources as
land, capital, energy, and so on. We were seen as not employing, or as under-
employing, the resources that were available. The need was to get every-
thing and everybody back to work.
Then, as now, there was widespread unemployment. And this familiar
need to provide jobs and get people back to work can seduce the powers
that be into thinking that we have the same problem with which we were
confronted eight decades ago and, therefore, that the same types of solutions
will suffice. Recall that the Keynesian prescription, which evolved into con-
ventional macroeconomic dogma, begins with the assumption that capital-
ism careens between unemployment and inflation.
There is today a vital difference: the resources that were observably idle
in the 1930s are now scarce, overworked, and deteriorating as we begin the
21st century. We still have unemployment, in part because we have so many
more people, but the situation with the rest of the natural-resource base is
exactly the opposite. Scarcity has replaced idleness. Availabilities of a host of
necessary resources are in question. Once-pristine environmental resources
are polluted and degraded. The macroeconomics, which may once have